The “$ .77 per dollar” construction is used frequently, generally intended to be illustrative rather than accurate. There are many women around me who have graduated from various distinguished universities and are among the most intelligent and talented of my friends and family. When we graduate from universities like IIT, NIT, IIM or International Universities like HEC and Columbia, we hope to have very good post-university opportunities that will open the doors for us to advance our career ladder. To my surprise, these women were pretty sure they were going to live a life of inequality. A future of gender discrimination awaited them. They were presumed to pay a 22% tax for being a woman in the workforce.
But wait. I do not blame them. Look around us and see the news that is selling us all day and all night. Just do a web search for the pay gap and you will be redirected to a host of websites that back up this notion with numbers. One of these web pages is the United Nations Trusted Web Link. According to the UN, women earn a meager 10% of world income, while working two-thirds of the world’s working hours. This would have been a shocking statistic if there was some veracity in it. More than 15 years ago, experts in gender and development at the University of Sussex, Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz, repudiated the claim: “The figure was invented by someone who worked at the UN because it seemed to represent the scale of inequality. gender at the time. “But there is no evidence that it was ever accurate, and it certainly is not today. Now if the UN statistics have been discredited, where do I go to see some hard numbers?
Another couple of links that appear are links to NOW (National Organization for Women), a US organization In it, again we see that famous number with the quote. “In the case of full-time workers throughout the year, women receive on average only 77 percent of what men are paid. Women still do not receive the same salary for the same work, much less the same salary for work of equal value. ” Now here is the question. This percentage says much more than we think. If you thought it meant that for the same job, women with the same skills, experience, only get paid 80% of what men are paid, you are wrong. This figure says something else. It is the ratio between the wages of women and men among full-time workers, in all types of jobs and regardless of the skills and preferences of the workers. That 80% is an aggregate, not an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women doing the same job. It’s no wonder college girls buy into this 77% pay gap myth.
To further discredit this number, I will release more stats in your own way so you can decide. The average man spends 14% more time at work. Men choose the highest paying majors compared to women who mainly choose jobs at the other end and in the middle of the spectrum. This figure also does not take into account differences in occupations, positions, education, seniority, or hours worked per week. When all these factors are connected, the wage gap narrows to the point of disappearing.
Now, I’ll get some arguments here that women’s education and career choices are not truly free, they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. From this point of view, the tendency of women to withdraw from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields such as early childhood education and psychology, rather than higher-paying professions such as petroleum engineering, is evidence of continuous social coercion. Here’s the problem: I can understand when this is said regarding countries like India or other Asian countries. But Western women are among the best-informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated in their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and degrading to begin with.
So why does this idea continue to be perpetuated? One reason is the pervasiveness of what workers are paid and the practice in most companies that they pay based on an individual rather than work. Given that large discrepancies persist between people with identical job titles, it remains difficult to pin down whether women actually earn less for doing exactly the same job as men in exactly the same circumstances. Okay, I’ve almost convinced you that gender pay is a sham. But wait, is there equality? Not quite.
What exists in our society is something known as the Gender Income Gap and the pay gap has absolutely nothing to do with it. There is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same job with the same training, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s Target Corporation, BASF, Facebook, Reliance, or McDonald’s, there is almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (with a higher salary) and one for women (with a lower salary). Of course, that would be illegal, and if such a practice existed, organizations would be open to legal action. The idea that we can close the gender pay gap simply by paying women more seems reasonable enough, like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. [3] has hinted. Unfortunately this is not the correct answer though. The gender pay gap does not exist because men and women are paid less for the same jobs, it exists because men and women tend to do slightly different jobs. When the same jobs are achieved, we will have gender pay parity. Because, as before, we already have the same pay for the same work.
What certainly exists is a well-documented gender income gap when the unadjusted median incomes of men and women are compared without correcting for any of the dozens of relevant factors that explain natural differences in income by gender. Take any big company. You are likely to find an earnings gap. Although men and women are paid the same for the same job, there are always more men than women in the highest paid positions and more women than men in the lowest paid positions and that is the heart of the problem, according to me. The most deserving women are not in these higher paid positions, which is a shame. Let me give you a real life example. My father works for a government oil company. I spent a month there and was in a refinery. I couldn’t find a single woman who worked in the office except one. The problem is that an overwhelming majority are men running for these positions. Candidates are in the single digits compared to men. Women who applied for an internship transferred to service sector companies, even if it meant having a job at a lower salary level.
The first step in solving any problem is to recognize that there is one. Lady. Sandberg’s solution would fail miserably if implemented. Women must actively seek jobs in these sectors and jobs to close this real gap. In reality, this gap has widened in these years, because not many people are focusing on it. In closing, I’d like to borrow from Mark Twain, it’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It is what you know for sure that it is not so.